


The Bonfires of August

by The Feels Whale (miscellea)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Possession, laura is a bamf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-18 05:02:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/875903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miscellea/pseuds/The%20Feels%20Whale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death for werewolves isn’t like death for humans. If you’re stubborn and you have reason to, you don’t …drift away to wherever it is you go. You can live within human dreams and hide in their shadows. Your sphere of influence is limited, but you can keep going on. If you play your cards right and have a good accomplice you can even come back.</p><p>There’s a reason why the Hunters cut their kills in half and it’s only partly to make a psychological statement.</p><p>Or: That one where Laura possesses Stiles, but he's largely okay with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bonfires of August

Laura is a terror and she knows it.

Even at the tender age of ten to Derek’s nine, she is constantly getting them both into trouble in all the best ways. Be it sneaking into the swanky private community pool in the nicer part of town or wrapping the middle school principal’s car in cling wrap, Laura is the one with the plan and Derek will follow determinedly after her. Sometimes they get caught, but not Derek if Laura can help it. He’s her little brother. She’s supposed to protect him.

“It was my idea.” She’d say. “I’m the one who gets in trouble if it goes south.”

Mind you, this doesn’t often work. Derek is as stubborn at nine as he will be at twenty-three so more often than not he is right there beside her when they get dragged before their parents in shame unless Laura can trick him into leaving.

(That happens more than Derek likes to admit to.)

This doesn’t change as they get older and that more than anything is the reason their mother chooses to train Laura as the next Alpha.

Laura never gets to tell Derek this, but she blames her after-school lessons with their mother for why she never spotted what was going on with Kate Argent before it’s too late. It’s because she could have (should have) seen this coming.

Kate has a reputation that you don’t really hear about unless you’re in certain circles. She has rather distinct tastes when it comes to men; young, comely, socially awkward, isolated from their peers, and the more sexually inexperienced the better. The jock crowd likes to call her the ‘Man Maker.’

At sixteen, Derek was her M.O. incarnate.

It isn’t until after the fire that Laura realizes that’s a common victim profile for serial killers as well.

Before she dies, Laura is in the middle of negotiating with the west coast coalition of alphas for the right to retake her territory and rebuild the Hale pack. Six years have passed and New York hasn’t done either of them a lick of good. The east coast is wretched for werewolves and living in the big city is making her insane.

The talks are going well enough; lots of boring meetings and politics until word trickles down the grapevine that there’s been activity in Beacon Hills.

It’s a chance for her to prove herself and it doesn’t go well.

The last thing she thinks about as she dies is that she should have prepared Derek better, but… she’s the big sister. She’s supposed to _protect_ him.

Death for werewolves isn’t like death for humans. If you’re stubborn and you have reason to, you don’t …drift away to wherever it is you go. You can live within human dreams and hide in their shadows. Your sphere of influence is limited, but you can keep going on. If you play your cards right and have a good accomplice you can even _come back_.

There’s a reason why the Hunters cut their kills in half and it’s only partly to make a psychological statement.

Much of the family’s lore is locked away in Peter’s skull and Laura would crack it open to pour out the contents if she could. Peter lost any right to her love and concern the second he laid a finger on a human inside her territory. What he did to Derek just makes her want to rip his head right off his shoulders.

Laura doesn’t have the lore, but she can observe and she has her instincts. She finds a shadow to hide in early on almost by accident. She misses on her first try, but later some boys dig up her grave and she’s able to make the leap when they break the mourning circle of wolfsbane and red rope Derek laid around her earthen tomb.

She’s lucky. Stiles makes an ideal host for her. He’s a smart and irreverent child who doesn’t take a single second of crap. She sees bits of herself in him and it makes her like him all the better for it. Mostly all she can do is watch, though, and give the occasional nudge.

It’s not much. Sometimes all she can do is tilt his wandering attention in the direction of an appropriate bumper sticker or something, but it seems like that’s all the boy really need. Sometimes he doesn’t even need that.

Getting Derek to strip for Danny? _Sheer genius_. Laura wishes she’d thought of that one years ago. She regrets the fall out a little, but Stiles really did have it coming.

(Although …Derek wouldn’t have done that when they were still in New York. She can’t help but think of that as progress.)   

They kill Peter in time, but it doesn’t feel like a victory. Laura knows she should accept the closure and move on, but something makes her stay in the cozy den she’s made of her boy’s shadow. Curiosity? Or maybe just foresight.

Derek builds a pack and at first glance there has never been a more unfortunate pack of misfits ever to run beneath the moon …and given the fact that 50% of the American werewolf population is made up of antisocial loners and misfits, that’s saying something.

However –there’s potential there. It takes a bit to see it, but each of those lost and lonely children that Derek lured into the moonlight has a spirit made of solid steel. They’ve already weathered the worst things that can happen to them in frail and fragile human bodies. What else can hurt them now that they’re wolves?

Quite a lot as it turns out, but they’ve already learned that most vital of lessons; _how not to break_. Everything else is just details.

Laura privately thinks Derek’s missed an opportunity in not biting Stiles, but she can’t quite make herself be upset about it. For one thing, she wouldn’t be able to hide in a werewolf’s shadow. If she has to jump she’ll be forced to choose either the Argent girl (and hell will _freeze over_ before that happens) or the Sheriff. No one else is quite close enough to the action. For another, Scott will do something incredibly stupid if Derek tries to change Stiles and Laura’s already got front-row seats to that particular show, thanks.

No, she likes it where she is. It feels more like home than anywhere she’s been in such a long time –not quite, but _closer_.

That’s the reason she growls and bites and snaps at empty air when the Argents steal her boy away from the lacrosse game. His father must be _frantic_. It’s why she curls around his psyche, crooning soothing nonsense when he finally loses consciousness. It’s why, when the Argents finally dump him by the roadside a few miles from Hale House, she takes over and guides his stumbling footsteps _away_ from her brother, away from Scott, away from the tiny war going on in their home town, and to a bus that will take him to a hospital.

Stiles is barely holding onto consciousness as they ride through the night. It makes it easy to guide his limbs because he can’t fight her. (Something to think about.)

However, Stiles is the one who chooses to lie to his father about non-existent bullies from the opposing team. Laura would gape if she could, until the pieces align in her mental puzzle and she realizes why Gerard Argent turned Stiles loose.

It wasn’t to send a message. He wants his opponents angry; angry and stupid the way only a werewolf can get this soon after the full moon when a pack member’s been hurt.

‘ _Good boy_ ,’ She whispers into his ear. ‘ _Good, brave,_ brilliant _boy_.’ She tells him because no one ever does and sometimes being alpha means being in your beta’s corner when no one else is.

She doesn’t think Stiles can hear her, but he turns his face away from the nurse who’s prodding at his ribs and his lips quirk ever so slighty –so maybe he can. However, Laura would have withheld her praise if she’d known that the damn kid would go running _right back_ into the fray.

Laura won’t lie, though, watching Gerard weep black blood is _extremely gratifying_. It’s not as gratifying as pulling him into the shadows and rending him limb from limb is, but it’s up there. This is the man who made Kate Argent, after all.

That night when Stiles stumbles into his own bed Laura curls up in-between the dips and folds of the coverlet and watches the window. The moon is just past full; waning gibbous, as Derek would call it, and her mind is awhirl with thoughts.

“Laura, _go to sleep_ , would ya?” Stiles grumbles into his pillow. “I’m getting a contact high off whatever it is you’re doing. Stiles needs a couple of REM cycles before we go cause more trouble, ok?”

Laura stills in her nest of blankets and the dark slashes of shadow cast by the silvery moonlight pouring in through the window. ‘ _You can hear me?_ ’ She asks.

“Of course I can hear you.” Stiles rolls onto his back and sort of glares in her general direction. He’s off by about a foot, but it’s close enough to make Laura shiver with excitement. “ _You never shut up_.”

‘ _That’s pretty funny coming from you_.’ She murmurs and slinks her way up the length of his narrow mattress. She finds a pool of shadow next to Stiles’ head and settles into it. ‘ _Are you angry with me_?’ She asks because Stiles has deep untapped pools of rage that you would never be able to guess were there unless you live with him, unless you live _in_ him.

“No.” He says. This time he manages to spot her a little better. “Did you eat Gerard? Deaton said he couldn’t find the body, that the tracks just vanished.”

‘ _No_.’ Laura tells him. ‘ _I killed him though_.’

“Good.” Stiles closes his pretty golden brown eyes. What color would they be if he took the bite, she wonders. Yellow, probably, almost everyone’s are. It would be a good look on him. “Next year… do you want to try what Peter did?”

‘ _I don’t know if I can_.’ Laura admits it, but the possibility… oh, the _possibility_ that she could hold her brother in her arms again, feel the sun on her skin, that she could smell the piney breeze of the forest surrounding her childhood home … that hope is too seductive.

“It’s worth a shot.” Stiles’ breath is evening out into the steady cadence of sleep and Laura keeps her thoughts quiet until he drops off into slumber.

She burrows into the darkest shadows underneath the blankets, tucked up underneath Stiles’ ribs. When she was alive she would never have thought to find warmth in the shade. It’s a different kind of warmth than she remembers. This is the warmth given off by a blazing heart, but it’s something to huddle up against all the same.

 _‘Good night, Stiles.’_ Laura murmurs against his skin and settles down for her nightly vigil, guarding her boy’s dreams from the scent of burning fur, twisted old men who weep tar, and crackle of electric current.

Tomorrow there will be another problem, another fight, and another dark night of the soul. Beacon Hills has always been that kind of place in its secret corners. Her family had a lot to do with the decades of peace that the inhabitants have come to take for granted, but the town has been without its pack for too long. There’s a lot of work to be done and Laura thinks that maybe –just maybe- she and her boy will be the ones to do it.

-fin

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a while ago. It's been sitting in a word document ever since. I don't know why I didn't post it, but I guess I had other stuff on my mind.
> 
> Laura doesn't get near enough attention, I think. So here is some fanfic about her. :)


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